Organising Your Folders and Files.

Folders and Files.

You can expect to have hundreds of folders and files on your PC in this day and age, and most of these will be your photographs. PC’s today have very large capacity hard drives enabling the user to store thousand’s of images and since the advent of the digital camera, photography has become more and more popular among people.

Large megapixel cameras enable us to to take super high-quality images that take up lot’s of megabytes on one’s hard drive, not a problem these days with the much larger capacity hard drives that are available.

We also are taking and storing a lot more images with our phones and cameras than ever before due to the cheapness of digital photographs compared with the cost of buying and using old fashioned film. Digital cameras and phones have enough capacity to store hundreds of high-resolution images meaning that you will always be able to take shots without the fear of running out of film cartridges, spools etc.

Organising.

You may have built up quite a few folders of images and named them after the event that the images relate to, such as ‘Pete and Mary’s Wedding’ etc, but after you have around fifty to a hundred folders all with names on you may find it difficult to locate a particular image or set of images especially if they were shot a few years ago.

One way to organise your folders and files that I have found really useful is to organise them into ‘date folders’ with years as the main folder name and within those folders, I have filed more folders or subfolders as months of that year. This also eliminates the need to think up names for different folders.

So for example, under your picture folder, you can create a folder and name it ‘1969’, and within that folder, you can create twelve folders and name each one after the months of that year. Of course, if you do this, Windows will organise the subfolders in alphabetical order, as can be seen in the image below;

Creating a New Folder.

To create a new folder, simply right click on a blank area inside the folder that you want to create a new folder in, then select ‘new folder’ from the menu that appears.

So for example, you want to create a folder named ‘1969’ in your pictures folder, go to and open your pictures folder, right-click on a blank area within your pictures folder, select ‘new’ from the menu that appears and name that folder ‘1969’.

If you were to create the folders in month order; Jan, Feb, Mar, etc then add the folder property ‘date created’ from the file menu Windows will then organise the folders in the correct month order as in the image that is shown below.

To show the ‘date created’ in the folder ‘1969’ that I have created, make sure that you have selected ‘view’ from the file menu, then select ‘details, and then right-click on the folder ribbon, a menu will show, then make sure ‘Date created’ is selected as shown in the image below.

If you have been using your digital camera properly and set the date and time correctly in your settings, your digital photo’s will display in the order in which they were taken, if you are not sure of the date, just check the properties by right-clicking on the image, as long as the date was set on the camera before it was used the correct date will show. Most probably, if it was your phone camera that was used to take the image, the date and time would be correct.

Organising your images in this way will help you retrieve any image that you are looking for rather quickly. You can go even further and organise your months ‘subfolders’ into days of the month if you so desire.

Any Folders and Files.

I have used images as an example to show how you can easily organise your folders and files, but you can also organise other files such as documents, bank statements, music files etc in pretty much the same way, over time you are going to build up an impressive amount of folders and files, so I think if you follow the way that is shown here, you will be able to locate any file that you want pretty quickly.